Hotmail Delivers Far Fewer Emails with Attachments

biednyFacet writes "It has long been suspected that there is a silent policy that makes Hotmail automatically delete the majority of attachments to save on bandwidth and internal disk space. Therefore it really doesn't matter if every client has access to 2GB of storage since they don't deliver the attachments to fill that space up anyway. If that truly is the case, then Microsoft may be liable for several hundred million cases of conspiracy and mail fraud."

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[x_MeRLiN_x]

To ASSUME makes an ASS out of U and ME?

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[smilindog2000]

False advertising is probably more accurate. However, Microsoft is not the only culprit. Yahoo regularly drops my e-mails if I attach a multi-megabyte file, without any bounce or warning. Also, I pay for this mail service, so it's not just the free accounts. When e-mails with large attachments do get through, they are often quite delayed, like an hour or more. Yahoo also forwards hundreds of spam e-mails to me every day, and SFAIK, there's not much I can do about it. The right place to stop spam is when an unknown server contacts you, and Yahoo just passes it right through, expecting a spam filter to fix the problem on the back-end.

This is *paid* Hotmail service

[billstewart]

If you RTFM, you'd see that this was paid Hotmail service, not just the free service. So they ought to be providing professional quality service, and apparently they're not.

And as far as other ISPs charging you lots of money per month, that's not normally the case for *email* service. My DSL service does cost me about $50/month (but I've got static IP addresses), but my mail-forwarder is $15/year, my ISP where I've got a shell account and run procmail is $7/month, and my wife uses Fastmail as an email provider for $19/year (they've also got free mail and $15-onetime options.)

Re:What about this "It's bullcrap"?

[spoco2]

Well, I've just sent an email with a excel attachment from one account to my hotmail... delivered
Then I forwarded that to another isp account... delivered
Then I created an email in hotmail with 2 jpegs and sent it to my first account... delivered
Then I forwarded that back to hotmail... delivered

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[jsse]

I suspect this may be partly because of an attempt at spam filtering since many spammy emails have attachments.

Quite the opposite.

Fyi., typical spams are less than 100K overall, so majority of the commercial spam filters are not scanning mails for spamming when individual size exceeds 500K. Of course you could change the default, but the performance would be dragged down severely.

Re:Is gmail any better?

[RedWizzard]

Try attaching a 1M file to a gmail send... Its quite slow. Often I have to try several times before a successful send. Further, I have never ever been able to send an attachment of size around 10M.

I just sent a message with a 15MB attachment. It was slow - took about 10 minutes to upload, which was about 3 times what I was expecting based on my ADSL connection upload speed, but it worked. Perhaps your connection is to blame for your issues?

They dont have any limit on the attachment size by policy. You can try to send any size... they just timeout.

Yes they do: 20MB [google.com].

Re:What about this "It's bullcrap"?

[cheater512]

The title is inaccurate. The summary is good.

Its saying that old attatchments are deleted.

Similar Behaviour Witnessed

[Afty0r]

I run an email server and a list with about 60 members which has regular daily discussions about a card game... my hotmail members do not receive about 10% of emails sent to the list - I've tested and verified this by adding a new Hotmail account of my own to the list.

There are no patterns - size/sender/attachment etc. The mails do NOT appear in the spam folder, and I can watch the SMTP logs in real time as the email is accepted by Hotmail, only to have it never arrive. I simply recommend that people do not use Hotmail and instead use another free email service like GMail.

Re:I'm skeptical

[robosmurf]

They would, and for one, I have.

I've complained bitterly about this to hotmail support without result.

The problem is that the 81% is misleading.

If the mail is coming from a known sender, then it is likely to get though, which is why people don't see a loss.

However, mail from a random address with an attachment is very likely to get silently dropped (no, it doesn't end up in the junk mail folder). Most users probably ARE losing a lot of mail, but as this mail is probably from people who have not mailed them before they don't notice.

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, while spammers hurting us, they still need to pay the bandwidth cost.

Most spam is sent by hijacked home computers. The spammers don't pay a dime.

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[gratemyl]

All articles on /. are on the front page at some point...

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[Sandbags]

RTFA. They're not dropping incoming attachments, but attachments you received, stored, and yourself chose not to delete. At some point, if the message goes unaccessed for a while, HotMail is deleting the attachments to save space. This is not fraud or tampering in any way, but a condition of service. Apparently, they give you 2GB of storage, but i guess to USE it, all your mail has to be current mail. They're not giving you an unlimited inbox to store whatever you want forever.

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[Keith_Beef]

I read the article, and didn't see anything about attachments disappearing after reception. Maybe my eyes are dim, maybe I misunderstood.

Please quote the section of the text that supports you assertion.

Beef